There are some popular explanations for this state of affairs. The most conspicuous one is that men have deficient psyches and lack the basic capacity for monogamous connectedness, for psychological or evolutionary reasons. Their psychological, biological, and evolutionary makeup makes them prone to sexual multiplicity because masculinity is promiscuous and because evolution demands men spread their sperm, rather than care for their offspring.55 Such explanations cannot be used by sociologists, because of their tautological character, explaining a given state by simply postulating that necessity inscribed it in the genes or evolution. A different explanation for this state of affairs is that men are confused by their traditional role being challenged by the new power of women. Men withhold their commitment because they are afraid of women and their increasing power threatening their identities.

[...] Instead of pathologizing men’s behavior, we should ask what kind of social relations make possible and even desirable men’s “fear” of or lack of commitment and which cultural frames make such behavior meaningful, legitimate, and pleasurable. To clarify the emotional mechanisms of choice and commitment, we need to approach male reluctance to commit and women’s readiness to commit as two symmetrical phenomena, both puzzling and both in need of explanation. Sociology is primarily interested in the social conditions that make some models of the self more available than others, and the kind of dilemmas that these cultural models may be responding to strategically. What are these conditions?

The historian John Tosh claims that in Western societies, masculinity “occurs in three arenas: home, work, and all-male associations.” Authority in the household, the capacity to earn a wage in a non-servile independent way, and the capacity to form meaningful bonds in voluntary associations, taverns, and clubs that effectively excluded women are traditionally the three pillars of masculinity. Capitalism and democratic polities mark a very important change in this tripartite structure: since the twentieth century the feminist movement and its impact on the political, economic, and sexual spheres have consistently and effectively challenged and eroded male authority in the household. Also, the rise of bureaucratic organizations and salaried work has curtailed men’s independence, with most men now working under the supervision of other men and/or women, and most all-male sites for homosocial association (with the notable exception of sport) have diminished, with heterosocial leisure the norm in the majority of venues. Thus, if, as Tosh suggests, masculinity is a “social status, demonstrated in specific social contexts,”64 then clearly some constitutive elements of that status and those contexts have been seriously eroded with the advent of modernity. Independence, authority in the household, and male solidarity have all been undermined, with traditional masculinity even becoming an inverse signal of status – culturally coded working-class masculinity. It is precisely in this context that sexuality has become one of the most significant status markers of masculinity . As argued in chapter 2, sexuality confers status. Sex appeal and sexuality have become attributes of gender identity and of what within that identity takes the form of status.65

There are three possible reasons that could be proffered for sexuality being so closely associated with male status. To the extent that sexuality was associated with the socio-economic status of powerful men, it retained its association with power and status even when the connection was less strong. Serial sexuality is attractive to men of all classes because, if access to women is restricted, it functions as a sign of the man’s status – of victory over other men. Male competitiveness, validation, and status were channeled through the realm of sexuality. For men, sexuality was a mark of status in terms of the capacity to compete with other men in securing the attention of the female sex: “Women provide heterosexual men with sexual validation, and men compete with each other for this.”69 Furthermore, men transferred to sex and sexuality the control they had formerly held in the household, and sexuality became the realm within which they could express and display their authority and their autonomy. Detachment in sexuality came to signal and organize the broader trope of autonomy and control, and, thus, of masculinity. Emotional detachment could be viewed as a metaphor for masculine autonomy, which the separation between sex and marriage had encouraged. Finally, through sex, men both competed with and forged bonds with other men by casting women’s bodies as the object of male solidarity.70 In other words, sexual freedom made sexuality a site for the exercise and display of masculinity for men whose status in the three arenas of work, home, and male sociability had been eroded: it transformed sexuality into status. If sex for men was a way to display their status and to bond with other men, the demise of men’s control over the household and of their autonomy in the workplace resulted in a sexuality that was hypertrophied, in that it merged and expressed at once the three aspects of masculinity as status: authority, autonomy, and solidarity.

From a cultural standpoint, there are two ways of experiencing commitment phobia: as hedonic, in which commitment is deferred by engaging in a pleasurable accumulation of relationships; and as aboulic, in which it is the capacity to want to commit that is at stake: that is, the capacity to want relationships. Another way to describe this divide is that one category includes a series of relationships and an inability to fixate on one partner; and the other is a category of those unable to desire a relationship. The first could be characterized as overflowing with desire, the second as deficient in desire. The first is characterized by the difficulty to settle on one object from an abundance of choice, the second by the problem of not wanting anyone.

[...] This man cannot come to a decision, despite having undertaken a lengthy process of introspection, which has paralyzed his will at the same time as activating his rational capacity to evaluate situations. This is reminiscent of the words by the poet Theodore Roethke, quoted by psychologist Timothy Wilson: “[S]elf-contemplation is a curse/ That makes an old confusion worse.”112 Eugene is waiting for an emotional self-revelation which he cannot achieve through rational introspection because the self is not a “hard,” fixed, knowable entity with clear edges, and with content. The social self is in fact a pragmatic entity, ongoingly shaped by circumstances and others’ actions. In engaging in introspection, we try to discover fixed needs or wants, but these needs or wants are being shaped in response to situations. For this reason, introspection interferes with the capacity to feel strong and unmitigated emotions, activated through non-rational cognitive circuits.

Commitment has instrumental and affective components.123 Choosers in the marriage market clearly are trying to combine the rational and emotional dimensions of choice-making. However, research suggests that the affective dimension of commitment ultimately is the strongest because commitment cannot be a rational choice. The process in which the architecture of romantic choice is faced with ever-larger numbers of potential partners diminishes the capacity to make a strong affective commitment because it mobilizes cognitive processes that increasingly interfere with and undermine emotionality and intuition.

The features of choice described above are the cognitive and sociological conditions that set up the psychological state known as ambivalence. While ambiguity refers to a property of cognition (uncertainty about whether an object is this or that), ambivalence refers to emotions. For Freud, ambivalence was a universal property of the psyche and consisted of a mixture of love and hate. The philosopher David Pugmire defines ambivalence more generally as the simultaneous existence of two conflicting affects toward the same object.124 However, I would argue that contemporary romantic ambivalence is different again: it refers to dampened feelings. “Cool ambivalence” might better describe this state, since it implies one of the main emotional tonalities referred to earlier, namely aboulia. Modern ambivalence takes a number of forms: not knowing what one feels for someone else (Is it true love? Do I really want to spend my life with him?); feeling conflicting emotions (the desire to explore new relationships while continuing in the current relationship); saying something but not feeling the emotions that should accompany the words (I love being with you, but I cannot bring myself to commit completely). Ambivalence is not intrinsic to the psyche but is a property of the institutions that organize our lives. Institutional arrangements are often responsible for people wanting conflicting goods: love and autonomy, and care and self-reliance, as expressed in the different institutions of family and market. Also, culture does not provide a clear sense of hierarchy among competing goods. [...]

[...] To be insecure means to feel uncertain about one’s worth, to be unable to secure it on one’s own, and to have to depend on others in order to secure it. One of the fundamental changes in modernity has to do with the fact that social worth is performatively established in social relationships. Another way to say this is to suggest that social interactions – the ways in which the self performs in them – are a chief vector to accrue value and worth to the self, thus making the self crucially depend on others and on its interactions with others. While until the middle or late nineteenth century the romantic bond was organized on the basis of an already and almost objectively established sense of social worth, in late modernity the romantic bond is responsible for generating a large portion of what we may call the sense of self-worth. That is, precisely because much of marriage and romance was solidly based on social and economic considerations, romantic love did little to add to one’s sense of social place. It is precisely the dis-embedding of love from social frameworks that has made romantic love become the site for negotiating one’s self-worth.

[...] Moreover, it is quite possible that what is staged here is simultaneously one’s capacity to criticize oneself (and therefore to display one’s character) and one’s capacity to build intimacy by revealing to another one’s flaws and faults. In displaying their capacity to uphold an ideal of character, and to criticize their own self in the name of that ideal, these women and men stage a self that is not in need of what contemporaries would call “emotional support” or “validation.” This is a self that can perform its own self-evaluation, and which derives a sense of worth not from “being validated” by another but from being held accountable to moral standards and from being improved in order to reach these moral standards. Undoubtedly such rituals of self-depreciation invite ritual protests from the other side; but rather than requests for “validation,” they functioned as “tests” of the man’s resilience and commitment. Here again, it is not the woman’s “self” or need for validation that is at stake, but rather the man’s capacity to display and prove his steadfastness.

He was, well he is a very famous academic. Everyone is in awe of him. Before I met him, I felt I was this invisible, insignificant thing, that no one paid attention to me. I always felt the more stupid one in the room. But when he chose me, when we were having this affair, I felt I had become a very special person, I literally felt smarter, and I could go up to people I would have never dared to talk to, I could talk to them and feel their equal. Even now that it is over, I feel I learned something important about myself, because if he could think I was special, then I felt I was special. I became less afraid of people.